Mess of Pandaria

Pandaria: Remix has been out for more than two weeks now and it's been quite a wild ride.

Our initial levelling duo hit level 70 after a little over 19 hours /played. The best personal reference I have for levelling speed is this post from when the husband and I first levelled characters just after the pre-Shadowlands level squish, at which point it took us over 26 hours to get to level 50 (the cap at the time). So our levelling in Remix was indeed sped up, but not by as much as I would've thought, especially considering that I did read all the quest text in BfA, while I'm mostly just skimming it in Pandaria. I'm sure there are people who level much faster than that even in regular retail.

Of course, I figured maybe the real speed levelling was meant to occur with alts, since the cloak with all the stats (including an XP bonus) was meant to be account-wide. This turned out to be somewhat false advertising though, as it doesn't actually work that way. Once you push your first character's cloak past a certain threshold, new alts do start with a bit of a boost, but it's much smaller than your main's numbers and static, so they still have to build up their own cloak from scratch after that. The levelling still goes quite a bit faster the second time around, but still... it was just a little bit disappointing.

The second pair of characters we made was a protection warrior (me) and my husband on a resto shaman. They're level 38 right now, as we're basically just doing a random dungeon every other day or so. Because he had last week off work and (as I mentioned before) always goes all-in on this sort of project, he also levelled a paladin to the cap without me during my work hours.

Happenings in the wider community have been pretty wild. Blizzard nerfed the "froggers" and keeps playing whack-a-mole to nerf new bronze farming spots as they emerge, but it doesn't really seem to matter, because at this point the first no-lifers and professional WoW players have ground out their gear one way or another and once you're at maximum item level, you're meant to be OP. The lofty days of week one when heroic dungeons actually felt kinda hard and LFR bosses would at least get to do one mechanic before dying are long gone. Everything just dies in seconds and every group just zergs to the end.

And that's... alright, I guess? I'm not here for the challenge so I don't mind getting a free carry towards some rewards. But I have been questioning my purpose with this game mode a bit. I don't care about using my bronze to upgrade my gear as it's only really useful in the extreme short term anyway (as is often the case in WoW) and to get all the transmogs and mounts you'd need something like over a million bronze, which is a lot. I honestly don't even feel like I need all of these cosmetics anyway, but since I'm unclear on just what my goals are, the sheer number of things I could miss out on is still daunting somehow.

In the usual way of retail WoW, they make it very easy to get a quick dopamine hit from a reward that only takes minutes to earn, but you're then meant to repeat that process hundreds of times during a specific time window, which is the point where I usually nope out. The rush of quickly levelling an alt can be fun for a while, but again... to what purpose? I have no particular interest in having a stable of alts at the level cap "just because". It'll just mean that I'll have fewer character slots available to level alts through other content later.

The only thing I know for sure is that I'll want to keep completing content with our first levelling duo, in order to polish off most of the questing for our nostalgia tour, and that I'll probably want to level at least a couple of alts for a different gameplay experience. Being a healer quickly started to feel pointless with all the self-healing that characters do in Remix, and on the rare occasion where healing could still be useful it doesn't scale well with the mode's massive stamina numbers, meaning that my biggest heal fills five percent of a tank's health bar at most, which is effectively useless. It's all just a little bit crazy and I suspect not entirely in the way Blizzard intended.